8

I have a text file with a marker somewhere in the middle:

one
two
three
blah-blah *MARKER* blah-blah
four
five
six
...

I just need to split this file in two files, first containing everything before MARKER, and second one containing everything after MARKER. It seems it can be done in one line with awk or sed, I just can't figure out how.

I tried the easy way — using csplit, but csplit doesn't play well with Unicode text.

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4 Answers 4

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12

you can do it easily with awk

awk -vRS="MARKER" '{print $0>NR".txt"}' file
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1 Comment

+1: Looove it. So concise and elegant. I've been needing this to discard a large portion of garbage out of logs which came from poorly configured build script.
5

Try this:

awk '/MARKER/{n++}{print >"out" n ".txt" }' final.txt

It will read input from final.txt and produces out1.txt, out2.txt, etc...

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3 Comments

Almost worked. Doesn't screw up UTF-8, but leaves MARKER in the second file.
Have you tried the solution shown here: unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/… - It uses csplit and works the way you want, that is, letting the marker out the files.
Not working as described. Needs "BEGIN{n=1}" Otherwise the initial file will be named "out.txt" and not "out1.txt". Contrary to your note. -- I tried to add this via an edit but it was rejected.
3 
sed -n '/MARKER/q;p' inputfile > outputfile1
sed -n '/MARKER/{:a;n;p;ba}' inputfile > outputfile2

Or all in one:

sed -n -e '/MARKER/! w outputfile1' -e'/MARKER/{:a;n;w outputfile2' -e 'ba}' inputfile
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Comments

1

The split command will almost do what you want:

$ split -p '\*MARKER\*' splitee 
$ cat xaa
one
two
three
$ cat xab
blah-blah *MARKER* blah-blah
four
five
six
$ tail -n+2 xab
four
five
six

Perhaps it's close enough for your needs.

I have no idea if it does any better with Unicode than csplit, though.

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1 Comment

That option does not seem to be available in the version of split included in GNU coreutils; I assume you're using a BSD of some flavor. In any case, on GNU-based operating systems like most Linux distros, coreutils includes both split and csplit, so they should have similar Unicode behavior.

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